Akamai Case

Increase the frequency of purchases by your customers. No matter how poor your current product or service, you must have some customers or clients. One key strategic dimension that you should be thinking about is how to augment and reposition your product in order to sell more to this group.

Question #1: What would be your prioritized list of IT investments? Four IT investments need to be prioritized; 1. 2. 3. 4. Ecommerce & Web sales Aligning the various systems (legacy, SAP, ERP) together. Hire relationship managers Make IT a “partner”

Concentrate on their current clients, broaden and deepen their relationship with them, while maintaining current offerings

They should provide discounts to retailers, which will provide better margins and more services in order to influence purchaser at the point of sale. One price for all retailers avoids channel conflict. Track retailer behavior to provide varying volumes of sales call. Adopt ways to improve relationship on one to one basis. Also, think of education on retail front. Sales people are the key figures for selling their products they should motivate them, by providing incentives, rebates commissions etc the sales people should make surprise visits, as a customer to see how their products are being displayed and to study the customer's behavior towards their products. They should provide the retailers with physical space for better inventory management, loss of sales were accounted, because there was no replenishment.

Recommendation – To improve revenues and margins, the company will have to increase the revenue contribution of every product category. I recommend that the company go into its customer requirements and see if it can cross sell product items, so that it can get more revenue from each customer. This will ensure that the company is able to offer competitive prices to customers and grow its business using its existing customers.

“It’s a homerun when you and the customer agree on what is expected and you are able to deliver exactly that. Know that customers who take time to explain their concerns are doing you a big favor. Set up a system to learn from breakdowns. Strive to match customer demands for level of quality, pricing, and accountability” (Gray, 2017). With the new sales representative role at Best Value, I would take the advice previously mentioned. Listening to the consumer and meeting that need would be the first priority of my role and managing expectations. This would also serve as a platform for the company as well to see if Best Value is able to meet the growing needs of their consumers and revisit the services and products that are offered by them.

The new sales force will also have to be able to; create new working relationships, develop new business, create a personal atmosphere for customers, and promote new business. After the sales force creates new business, the team must be able to retain these newly established customers. They will have to create small, obtainable, measurable goals for themselves in order to create and sustain new business. The salespeople will have a sales quota of thirty units per month and the commission will go up in increments of ten percent after

2.     Given the markets the company is operating in, what is the best structure for the sales force? How did you decide?

4. Initiate year round sales force: This will allow for a more even flow of sales revenue. Presently, we have four geographic regions across the U.S. We will recruit a total of 500 commissioned based sales people across the country. Our recruiting efforts will continue via the web sites already being used. Each Vice President and Director will have final word on hiring for his or her district. The Vice President or Director will execute all training efforts.

In the B2B domain the fastest way to improve your sales number is to build great relationships with your customers. Relationships help discern when the industry a large number of established players in the market, customers are always asking for price-cut and the industry is quite mature with widespread adoption of products.

* Go to either of Wholesale or Internet Marketing screens and reduce the Marketing efforts (reducing the sales forecasted to sell)

Target your best customers and find a way to interact with them on a somewhat frequent basis, spending more time on high value customers. Forums and public events are both great ways to do this and helps educate your consumer base as well.

* No proper market segmentation – wide age of customers 18 -45 years male and female

• Reach out to the strategic vendors and partners and include them in MaxTrade IT strategy

The Bargaining Power of Customers: this differs on the variety of deal the client needs. While swapping costs continue high, the propagation of cloud technology recovers the mobility of customers, particularly for small business, general bookkeeping and tax services. Conversely, converting costs in specialist areas and corporate clients stay high, and are showing no signs of reduction any time soon.